Beyond Form: Abstraction at Midcentury
Art Institute of Chicago
This show is an expansive look at abstraction post-WWII, a necessary encyclopedic presentation of multitudes, anchored by time period and movements. At once broad and oddly specific, I appreciated the opportunity to look outwards from the center of abstraction, watching as the gallery layout created links between artists.
As a nothing-is-original-truther, it was difficult for me to process Zero-kai(zero society)'s goal of starting from zero. The curators note that their works "make little to no reference to the external world". Not that I necessarily have the perspective to deem this accurate or not, but it was a bit surprising that this claim is made within this gallery's context. The work by Zero-kai artist Tanaka Atsuko was directly referential to Japan's rapid industrialization and technological advancement after WWII.
I think I do tend to get a bit caught up in semantics in exhibition texts... perhaps the claim is more about the visual and stylistic qualities of the work than the conceptual. yes, that's probably it. Sometimes I have to write about something in order to process it properly.
I recently re-read about the Pictures generation, the artists in the 70s that, in the reproduction of mass-market media and production of images, critiqued media through embedded, often illegible layers of theory butted with infighting. It was a form of over-thought critique, rooted in a common frustration over inaccessibility and underrepresentation, that feels comparable to some of the new contemporary art I see.
I want to write and learn more about it someday, but as I re-read Jerry Salz's essay on the movement, I was pondering its relationship to midcentury abstraction. These artists were raised in the midcentury, witnesses to the post-war resetting of the world and likely artists re-orienting themselves to making work through a process-based lens. I think that for the artists in this exhibition, process began in the studio- for pictures artists, the process included encountering the newspaper ad or looking down a street.
I love when I encounter a piece that makes a stranger approach me. The last time I remember this happening was at the Ruth Asawa retrospective at MoMA, this past spring. It's normally about process, speculating on how something was achieved in a work. At this show, Michelle and I were inspecting Lenore Tawney's ink drawing, Red Circle (1964). Another gallery-goer was curious how many tries it took to get the lines right. Together we wondered if the piece was a practice of meditation itself, and I noticed the order in which she applied the inked lines.
After I left the show I dove into Tawney's fiber practice- after all, I was at a textiles residency! Her work is suspenseful, airy, transparent, anchored in rectangle. I found it apt that her work was on my mind given that on this trip to Chicago, I was focused on weaving and paper-making. On the very first day, Michael hosted us in his studio and while I was fixing tension and threading my string heddles, he gave Michelle a weaving demo on his gorgeous loom.
We visited LMRM and Chicago Pulp, we wove and made paper, we filmed a horizontal music video (we were encapsulated in the rectangle and to the rectangle we belong).
I <3 Chicago!